Pyne won’t retract false 100Mbps NBN claim

news Federal Shadow Education Minister Christopher Pyne has declined repeated requests for him to retract an inaccurate comment he made on Triple J’s Hack program last week claiming that no customers had been connected to Labor’s National Broadband Network at speeds of 100Mbps, despite evidence being provided to the contrary.

In an interview last week broadcast on Triple J’s Hack program (the audio is available online in MP3 format; Pyne’s comments are around the six minute mark), Pyne was asked to respond to a recent suggestion by Prime Minister Julia Gillard that the delivery of the Labor Federal Government’s flagship National Broadband Network infrastructure would make it easier for teachers to deliver instruction in Asian languages to students through technologies such as videoconferencing.

Pyne responded: “The National Broadband Network is not up and running. They have connected six and a half thousand households in three years under the National Broadband Network, and not one household or school has been connected at 100 megabits per second, which was the promise.”

Over the past week since Pyne made the comments, Delimiter has contacted Pyne’s office repeatedly via email and telephone to request that the MP’s inaccurate statement be retracted as it was “demonstratably false”. In response, the MP issued a statement addressing his figure for the amount of NBN active connections connected so far, but without addressing the 100Mbps claim.

“It is a demonstrable fact,” said Pyne in his new statement, “that as of September 2012 only about 6,400 premises were connected to the NBN fibre optic network according to Senate Estimates, making the multi-billion dollar taxpayer funded roll-out years and years behind schedule. If Labor want to pop open the champagne corks to celebrate that figure, then they are sadly out of touch with the expectations of Australians.”

The truth of Pyne’s comment that only 6,400 Australians had connected to the NBN in total so far is unclear, as NBN Co has not disclosed the break-up of connected customers on its fibre networks, as opposed to its wireless or satellite infrastructure. However, it is likely that Pyne’s estimate is approximately correct. In NBN Co’s corporate plan released in August this year, the company said at that stage it had some 3,500 active services connected to its fibre networks, and a further 10,000 connected to its fixed wireless and satellite networks. However, as the company has entered its rapid rollout phase, NBN Co has started rapidly connecting more users.

For example, NBN Co’s head of Government, Communications and Stakeholder Relations Kieren Cooney told a Senate Estimates hearing on 16 October this year that NBN Co had bolstered the total number of active users on its network to 24,000 over just a three month period. Over the next nine months to mid-2013, that number of active users is expected to increase four-fold, to reach some 92,000 active connections. By mid-2013, NBN Co is planning to have covered some 661,000 premises in total with its network infrastructure, with about half that amount being fibre infrastructure and about half being satellite or wireless. Not all those premises will immediately start using the infrastructure, however.

Pyne’s new comment that the NBN is “years and years behind schedule” may also be inaccurate. NBN Co’s latest business plan published in August shows that the project is only six months behind schedule, due primarily to delays in negotiating with Telstra over the terms under which it will transfer its customers onto the NBN and shut down its existing copper network. The broadband company’s rapid rollout phase has commenced in the latter half of this year.

Pyne’s comments come as a number of senior members of the Coalition continue to make demonstratably inaccurate claims with respect to the NBN in the media. For example, several weeks ago Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey repeated several times an inaccurate claim that the NBN’s funding could be treated as an expense in the Federal Budget, despite the fact that accounting standards require it to be treated as a capital investment. As Pyne did, Hockey’s office similarly declined to retract the statement, claiming despite evidence provided to the contrary that it was the Shadow Treasurer’s view that his statement was correct.

Hockey’s comments come as the latest in a long line of inaccurate and misleading statements the Shadow Treasurer has made about the NBN project. Earlier this month, for example, Hockey claimed the National Broadband Network could cost as much as $100 billion to build, despite the company’s own estimates showing that it will require around $37 billion of capital injection from the Government and eventually make a return, paying back the investment with some profit on top. In June, in another example, Hockey inaccurately claimed that 4G mobile broadband had the potential to be “far superior” to the fibre technology of the NBN.

Similarly, several months ago, speaking on Channel Ten’s Meet the Press program, Nationals Leader Warren Truss made a number of major factually inaccurate statements about the project, as detailed in this article by Delimiter at the time. In addition, Truss had previously made a number of inaccurate statements about the NBN over the past several months.

opinion/analysis
The fact that Pyne has chosen not to retract his false 100Mbps statement despite being presented with evidence that it was wrong — and in fact has chosen flatly ignore the fact that he made it in the first place — is unforgivable. Australian society places a high emphasis on honesty and on admitting when we’ve done something wrong. If the Coalition wins the next Federal Election, and Pyne becomes the Federal Education Minister, will the MP similarly be unable to admit mistakes, even small ones such as the one he made on Triple J last week, when they relate to important policy decisions? Surely humility would be the better part of valour, to misquote Shakespeare.

The Shadow Education Minister’s approach to the issue is also part of what appears to be a disturbing trend from the Coalition of continuing to deny the veracity of hard evidence when it’s put to them. When speaking to the offices of Pyne and Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey over the past several weeks, we’ve witnessed similar approaches where both have refused to acknowledge evidence showing that their views on matters pertaining to the NBN are inaccurate. This sort of denialist approach, to put it mildly, is not the sort of behaviour we like to see from leading Australian politicians. Sound government policy must always be based on evidence, not opinion; especially when that opinion can be shown to be inaccurate. To pursue any other path is to turn away from rational thought — which should be anathema for the leaders of any modern society.

87 COMMENTS

““It is a demonstrable fact,” said Pyne in his new statement, “that as of September 2012 only about 6,400 premises were connected to the NBN fibre optic network according to Senate Estimates, making the multi-billion dollar taxpayer funded roll-out years and years behind schedule. If Labor want to pop open the champagne corks to celebrate that figure, then they are sadly out of touch with the expectations of Australians.””

Years and years? That’s right, if you ask a Liberal for a correction they’ll give you some more lies.

an even bigger disgrace and something that needs to be brought to the public’s attention even more is the pitiful behaviour of the so called journalists that are being fed these statements and letting them slide unquestioned.

i only wish more journalists had the integrity to confront the politicians making these statements like Renai does.

“i only wish more journalists had the integrity to confront the politicians making these statements like Renai does.”

The sad fact of the matter is that most journalists aren’t trained to do this kind of thing (they are more trained along ‘he said, she said’ lines); and unless they are a niche journalist focused on a specific area (as I am), they often lack the knowledge in specific fields to call out politicians for blatant misrepresentations etc. It helps that I run my own publication, as I don’t have to answer to a ‘boss’ who can countermand articles which may be a little too hard-line for mainstream media; again, mainstream media tends to go with ‘he said, she said’ kind of stuff.

unless they are a niche journalist focused on a specific area (as I am), they often lack the knowledge in specific fields to call out politicians for blatant misrepresentations etc
quite simply, if a journalist doesn’t know enough about a subject to correctly question in interviewee then they shouldn’t be interviewing that person.

Unfortunately it’s the reality of modern media ;) There is a real skills crisis in Australia in this area. It is quite rare to find someone who has both journalism/communications skills and domain knowledge in a certain area.

This is alot like calling a plumber to fix the home electrics. You just dont do it, because you know he probably wont or cant.

Personally, I think you should have a background in the portfolio you stand for in politics. Its silly that positions like Federal Treasurer – the candidates arent even business owners / economists / accountants etc.

If true, that probably goes some way to explaining the death of old-style journalism outlets, like newspapers. Increasingly what he and she said is already on the internet. We don’t need a highly paid reporter to tell us that.

Well, maybe some, but not many. The days of 1000’s of reporters taking news off the wire and each other and just repeating it in the local rag, or on the local tv or radio are almost over. That job can be handled by 100’s of reporters updating a single web site that services the entire nation – just ask the ABC.

Today’s successful journalist has to add things that take the reader more than 5 minutes to find himself – content, background, insight, references and history. If they aren’t doing that now, they should start looking for another job. They will be soon enough anyway.

“unless they are a niche journalist focused on a specific area (as I am), they often lack the knowledge in specific fields to call out politicians for blatant misrepresentations etc”

That doesn’t in any way excuse the journalist from following up the politician after the blatant misrepresentation is pointed out to them. The media cannot claim to be a “fourth estate” if it fails to call politicians to account for blatant misrepresentation.
The failure of the media in this regard has reduced it to little more than a party political publication.

It baffles me that such blatant lies (I’m calling them lies because Pyne has been presented with the facts and he has chosen to ignore them) get reported. Yes, it helps to be knowledgeable about a particular topic if you’re going to report on it, but we are living in an era where simple research and fact checking have never been easier. It makes me wonder if journalism students might benefit from a unit titled “JFGI 101”

I’d say it would be pretty hard for Pyne to lose the seat in the next election given his opposition front bench profile. It would help if the Greens would put up a candidate who didn’t have a weirdass hair style (if you think I’m kidding, visit that page). If they could take a few percentage points off Pyne, and Labor could hold its current vote, then Pyne would really have a fight on his hands. Of course, with only a 3.4% margin, he has a fight on his hands anyway. If I were him, given his profile, I would be punting for a much safer Senate seat.

If the liberals are wanting my vote (and yes, it could be possible if they actually did something to warrant me switching my thinking currently) they’re not actually presenting themselves to be a good alternative. Currently, no party is really great in my opinion, however, Labor seems overall to be better (somehow).

I love that photo; it contains almost everyone from the Coalition who has made NBN-related misrepresentations over the past year; plus, Turnbull (who is usually pretty well informed about the NBN) looks to be castigating Pyne over it :)

Now there is an inaccurate statement. If you would do your research, you would see that a great many of the coalition members have lies and untruths and inaccuracies and lies by omission on their websites and in interviews with local newspapers and everywhere. The challenge should be finding the coalition members that aren’t engaged in a campaign of lying about this as much as about the carbon price.

To suggest that this picture contains most of the people in parliament telling lies about the NBN doesn’t come close.

Perhaps they choose to talk to them because they don’t generally get challenged?

Might have just been the presenter I was listening to at the time, but I prefer it when the interviewee is challenged on their responses and their avoidance of hard figures.
Of course, that can’t occur if the inteviewer doesn’t completely understand the topic being discussed.

The problem with the mainstream media doing any real interviewing is that if they want to retain their audience, they have to keep the flow of stories and interviews rolling through, but if they ask too many difficult questions ala Paxman the parties will simply stop giving interviews to those outlets. Now if you’re the ABC you can afford to push that particular envelope, or if you’re a blog site with limited costs and a dedicated readership, but larger commercial news outfits are fighting to stay alive against the internal pressures of their own entertainer divisions, let alone that of the external marketplace. Until such time as professional, investigative journalism is untethered from the corporate requirement to turn (an exponentially increasing) profit, journalists and their editors are going to keep turning out ‘soft’ news full of safe, uncritical articles that can be written in under two hours without having to leave the desk or make a single fact-checking phone call.

To be perfectly honest, the collapse of corporate news media is exactly what we need – people turning away from big mainstream media and subscribing to the blogs of the disenfranchised journalists who aren’t afraid to spend the time and effort digging deeply and pushing buttons to get the real story.

The future of free journalism, much like the future of politics, healthcare and other essential services, necessarily lies beyond the pockets of corporations and private industry, who are by their very nature self interested and thus opposed to the core interests of the very services they purport to provide.

I think what you say has quite a lot of validity, but to be honest, wherever I’ve worked, at CBS and Fairfax, I found there was very little pushback on journalists from the commercial interests part of the business — in most cases the journalists were left alone to do what they did best. It seems that almost everyone who’s not a journalist seems to believe that journalists are nearly always affected by commercial interests; but in my opinion it’s very rarely that they are. This is why, for me, I put the current crap quality of the mainstream media largely in the laps of individual journalists rather than on the heads of their financiers. Many of Australia’s journalists are tragically lazy at the moment (including myself at times). That’s the real problem here — not the money end which disguises it.

When you were working for commercial media, how much time were you given to research, investigate and fact check your story? Corporate pressure is rarely exercised as editorial censorship, most journalists will self-censor anyway. No, the real impact comes from prrformance pressures to knock out 8 articles a day and no scope for investigative stories that could take months to put together (unless the journalist wants to do it on their own time).

the collapse of corporate news media is exactly what we need – people turning away from big mainstream media and subscribing to the blogs of the disenfranchised journalists who aren’t afraid to spend the time and effort digging deeply and pushing buttons to get the real story.

That sounds great in theory. However, it appears to me that in practice, people who turn away from mainstream media tend to gravitate towards blogs and other alternative sources of information that match their political and social predispositions and leanings. So we’ll end up with a huge segmentation of the media space, with each information source “preaching to the converted”, in a way. This started happening even in the “old” mainstream media some time ego (does anyone read Murdoch media for objective news and analysis, unless they are on the right of the political spectrum?) but the move to “new” media will only exacerbate this ghettoization process.

That’s a good point, but self segregation along idealistic and class lines is nothing new – it’s been happening for as long as humans have been communicating, particularly among the less educated. The difference is, at least we have a chance of ending up with more choice and a higher quality of journalism if self-employed bloggers can make a living while remaining independant of corporate interests, because the result of 25 years of restructuring and ‘efficiency measures’ has been demonstrably less choice and a much lower quality of journalism for everyone, not just the knuckle-draggers who are happy being spoon-fed sound-bites and celebrity tweets as their source of ‘news’.

The only thing I can say, is that I wish that the rest of the media actually picked up on the lies and inaccuracies that have become so prevalent in politics. Shouldn’t the Australian people deserve better than their representatives spouting what amounts to bullshit, and then the papers and news just replaying it?

As a former network engineer, I am sick and tierd of luddite polys using our digital future as a political point scoring exercise. These people are so desperate for a byline they embarrass themselves with lies and misinformation for political gain at the expence of our future. A fibre backbone to the home is essential to deliver convergence services of the future. The semantics of what boxes and technology hangs off it is imaterial (ADSL,atm, frame). Privatisation has not worked in Australia with infrastructure investment at an all time low. The liberals are a lost cause on anything to do with technology.

I wouldnt worry too much about his statements. If anything, they serve the Labor cause much better than the truth does.

We know NBN Co has hit its bulk rollout phase. If the magic number right now is 6400, whats it going to be in 12 months time when we’re hitting the election phase? I havent looked at the plan for a while. but lets say they roll out to 1 million homes in the next 12 months (pretty sure the plan is around that, give or take).

How does it look if that 6400 number grows to 300,000 in 12 months?

Point being, most of the FUD being spread is good soundbites for Labor, if the NBN is as good as they say. Its profile will be massive this time next year, right when it needs to be. So whats to stop them using a Fact or FUD campaign by rolling these statements out then putting the truth next to them?

To put it another way, we had months and months of smear campaigning against the Carbon Tax, then when it was rolled out… nothing. LNP were their own worst enemies, highlighting it to such an extent that when it didnt deliver it was a major backfire. NBN is going down the same path.

Sound government policy must always be based on evidence, not opinion; especially when that opinion can be shown to be inaccurate. To pursue any other path is to turn away from rational thought — which should be anathema for the leaders of any modern society.

Well, as someone mentioned above, it really does seem that the Coalition here is taking their plays straight from the US Republican party, which is going from strength to strength despite an almost total rejection of science. The number of times they’ve won elections with campaigns based on provable lies is, quite honestly, frightening.

It also seems the “easy” way to campaign. Don’t get people to vote for you because you have better policies – that’s too much like hard work. First, you have to actually *have* some policies, then they have to be *better* policies, then you have to be able to persuade the electorate that they’re better – a difficult challenge, given many policy areas require quite a bit of background knowledge before you can make that call.

It’s far easier to just discredit your opponents, and present yourselves as the alternative. Who cares if a vote for you is a vote for your policies or a vote against the ‘other mob’ – you still get elected either way, and if you don’t actually promise anything concrete, you can’t be held to account for failing to deliver!

The solution is simple. You know who not to vote for at the next election. And make sure you tell other also who not to vote for. I mean if a party can Lie this much when they are not in power imagine what will happen when the are in power.

Carbon Tax? You mean the carbon pricing scheme that isn’t a tax, and which was promised by the ALP in the 2007 election campaign and then again in the 2010 election campaign?

Budget surplus? Obviously nobody knows if that will be achieved or not, since so much of it depends on worldwide economic conditions, so the only lies and deceptions here are from you, and of course whoever is paying you to troll forums with these talking points (Menzies House?)

Unfortunately no evidence in this article to say that the statement was false.
The statement “no customers had been connected to Labor’s National Broadband Network at speeds of 100Mbps” is not refuted by the fact ” the 100Mbps service – has attracted 44 percent of services”.

Just because you sign up for 100Mbps does not mean you recieve 100Mbps. Often the the speed of the service you sign up for is the maximum speed of the service provided under ideal conditions. I’m not sure if the NBN is any different.

I would actually be interested to see if the NBN service is actually delivering 100Mbps speeds to the customers signed up for the 100Mbps service.

Renai, you need to wake up. I agree with Matt that just because a RSP’s customer has signed to a 100mb/s service does not actually (for various reasons) guarantee they are connecting to or capable of obtaining throughput from their RSP of 100mb/s. On this point Christopher Pyne is 100% accurate unless NBN Co or an RSP can provide actual connection and throughput speeds. I know for a fact that there are a number of RSP’s shuddering internally about the crap NBN Co push out to the public in regards to the type of connection and throughput speeds people will actually get.

Statistics provided by NBN Co, even to senate estimates are nothing more than estimates and predictions and in many cases estimates based on predictions. As you have mentioned, NBN Co has not released any highly accurate figures surrounding anything. By your own admission you must rely upon the figures presented by Pyne regarding the number of active connections as NBN Co has not released these. Unless you can obtain official specific figures of the number of active connections, type of connection, service speed and actual CPE connection speed and throughput you are UNABLE to make the claim Pyne is misleading people.

The fact remains that many reading and commenting in this opinionated blog have no more of an idea of actual numbers than the next people. NBN Co and the Government will only release numbers sympathetic to their cause.

No RSP is going to give on one hand a 100Mb/s connection to a retail client with a guaranteed 100Mb/s throughput when on the other hand corporate telco’s are selling 100Mb/s connections for thousands of dollars each month. Basically, as a ballpark. 1mb/s is AU$25/mth once above 10mb/s. Based on that your talking AU$2500/mth for a 100mb/s port with a committed throughput of 100Mb/s. On top of that you going to need to pay for your throughput or data actually transferred.

Whenever the NBN is being reported on by Delimiter, the common theme these days is to take pot shots at anyone who does not share the opinions of the government, NBN Co or Renai.

Renai, take a deep breath and stop placing so much confidence in the figures/estimates and predictions NBN Co and the government provide you with or are reported by your other news sources. For some reason you taking NBN Co and the Governments ‘pro-NBN’ comments as gospel and refuse point blank to accept that their is often widespread industry dispute about the NBN and how it is bing built. Even many of the vendors involved in the actual construction have opinions vastly differing from those fo the government and NBN co but as many companies are always still willing to accept the many many many millions of dollars they are bing thrown.

“On this point Christopher Pyne is 100% accurate unless NBN Co or an RSP can provide actual connection and throughput speeds.”

Sorry but you are wrong and excusing Pyne for his idiocy in the process. NBNco wholesale 100/40mbps connections to ISPs and they sell 100/40mbps connections to customers. How much speed is ever achieved is irrelevant, you can’t say “not one household or school has been connected at 100 megabits per second” that is totally false. NBNco have delivered “100 megabit” connections to ISPs and those ISPs have delivered “100 megabit” connections to customers. NBNco do NOT have to “provide actual connection and throughput speeds” all they have to do is lay fibre, test that it can achieve 100mbps down and 40mbps up. That is ALL they are obliged to do and that is what they have achieved. It is ridiculous to expect anything more.

“Whenever the NBN is being reported on by Delimiter, the common theme these days is to take pot shots at anyone who does not share the opinions of the government, NBN Co or Renai. ”

Oh I’m sorry. Was that a “pot shot”? I’ve noticed the “common theme” with some commenters these days is to cry foul and use these pre-emptive silencing tactics in an attempt to avoid any criticisms themselves. As I’ve said before I won’t placate anyone. You’re an adult (I assume), you want to freely criticise the “government” and/or “NBNco”? Right? Go right ahead, everyone should and does have that right and as such on an open forum such as Delimiter you should expect the same criticisms of your own comments in return… and especially when you get it plain wrong.

True, there is a contention ratio… both on the fiber and on the backhaul. However, common usage is to reference the peak speed (misleading though that may be). Pyne should have specifically talked about sustained throughput if that’s what he really meant.

It’s a tricksy industry, and it’s going to stay that way with or without the NBN.

I must admit I regularly have to explain what contention ratio is all about, even to people who have heard it many times before. *SIGH* Pyne isn’t the only one confused by it.

Thats assuming Pyne was “confused” about the technical jargon… and trying to be a bit more clever about the criticisms about the NBN’s services.

Personally however i subscribe to the whole “occham’s razor” of thinking – “the simplest is best explanation”. And that would be Pyne is basically just spouting the same Coalition rhetoric of discrediting the NBN.

Then again now that we’ve given Pyne an “excuse” there is nothing stopping him from cooking up an “explanation” of his statements

Your potential ‘download’ speed is not your connected speed – that is the speed at which your ‘modem’ or connection equipment can attain a stable sync rate at. As discussed above, network overheads necessarily dictate that your ‘usable’ speed cannot achieve your actual connection speed, but just because there are overheads doesn’t mean you aren’t connected at the contracted speed.

So as Ren said, yes, it does – your lack of understanding merely demonstrates that (your lack of understanding), not that you have a valid point.

Oh for pete’s sake. We are discussing the NBN here, not ISP’s. If the NBN is contracted to give you are 100MB/s connect then you last mile runs at 100MB/s. No if’s, no butts – that is what it is. What your ISP is capable of delivering from site X is a different question. It varies by ISP, who site X is, the time of day, the day of week and probably the weather.

DSL lines do deliver their promised speeds to the rare few fortunate enough to be able to use it. Fibre delivers its promised speed as well, except it takes the copper loop lotto out of the equation.

Because of how copper lines transmit data (and more importantly because of limitations in using copper), there is a drop off in real world speed as you get further from the exchange. But because of how fibre works, there is no noticable drop off in real world speed.

So where DSL may deliver its promised speed to 5% of users, fibre delivers to 95%. There is SOME drop off at a relatively massive distance from the exchange (15 kms?), so its not 100%, but for all practical reasons fibre may as well be.

Anyone that far away from an exchange is likely to be one of the 7% of the population on fixed wireless or satellite.

There is SOME drop off at a relatively massive distance from the exchange (15 kms?), so its not 100%, but for all practical reasons fibre may as well be.

Is there?

My understanding is the signal runs at 3.2 Gb/s regardless of cable length. The cable is rated to carry that up to 20Kms, although the NBN uses a more conservative value. Or to put it another way, the NBN doesn’t vary it’s speed depending on cable length. They just use a single value which will work at all cable lengths they plan to deploy.

They don’t have much choice really. Since the same signal is split amongst 32 users all users see the same signal – including the user adjacent to the exchange and the user at the end of the cable. So the same signal must work for both.

Yes the longest NBN fibre is12 km. Average is about 6 km. I find that quite amusing, at 6 km you’d barely get an adsl2 connection.

Mr TURNBULL: Can I just a question, Mr Payne. What is the typical distance between the FAN and the beginning of the lead-in conduit, which I guess is the curb?
Mr Payne: Within an FSAM?
Mr TURNBULL: Within a FAN or FSAM, yes.
Mr Quigley: It can go from a few hundred metres to 12 kilometres.
Mr Steffens: Twelve is the limit, yes.
Mr TURNBULL: Yes, that is the limit, but what is the average we are talking about in the cities—a couple of kilometres or longer?
Mr Quigley: We are probably looking at six kilometres, I would say, on average. As the distance goes out, you are picking up more premises.

Yes, there is a clearly demonstratable dropoff past a certain point. I thought it was 15 kms, it may be the 20 kms you say. But the dropoff is very gradual, and not something you’d notice anyway, and not really the point I was making. The dropoff is something incredibly minor to the speeds offered.

Numbers tie in with what you say – 3.2 Gb/s split amongst 32 users is 100 Mb/s, pretty much guaranteed for 15 or 20 kms minimum.

The fibre line isnt perfect, and it does lose data integrity along the way, which ultimately causes a slight speed issue. Just not even close to what copper does, meaning lengths can be much much longer before its an issue.

By the time you get to that point where there is any dropoff at all, the fibre has stopped though. Nobody will have a connection length that long, so any dropoff at all becomes irrelevant.

Its that increased probability of errors that I’m refering to – past a certain distance, it becomes noticable, albeit as a very small reduction in max speed.

A loss of speed, for whatever reason, is still a drop off in performance. At least to my thinking. If people are getting that confused with a waterfall type drop in performance then I appologise.

As you say (and another thing I was trying to get across) the situation is effectively irrelevant as the system effectively renders the situation as non-applicable, whether its through minimising the distance of the line, or through sufficient SNR to compensate.

if the line is saturated, and you’re distance is too far though, you can measure a reduction in performance. Its just not going to be a big reduction, and there needs to be very specific circumstances for it to happen. But remember that copper lines started the same…

End of the day, by the time this sort of thing DOES become a practical issue, the world is going to be a much different place. Maybe the Atomic Banana will be a reality by then.

“DSL lines do deliver their promised speeds to the rare few fortunate enough to be able to use it.”

Actually no. DSL runs over ATM, which has an overhead of around 15%. So the 24Mb/s max speed of ADSL2+ can only give at best 20Mb/s payload speed, less when you factor in the high level overheads. That compares quite badly with the 5% overhead of fibre.

Perhaps your right but for reasons you are not aware of. The speedtests we have been seeing from NBN users who signed up to 100mbit do not appear to be getting 100mbit. They have been achieving up to 117mbit

For anyone still with doubts that 100Mbps is achievable over the NBN, the following result was obtained by Whirlpool member “Bob of Midway Point” and it clearly shows that 100Mbps is definitely being delivered over his Internode NBN connection:

What is also funny about Chris Pyne’s statement is that I myself actually had a 100Mbps NBN connection via Internode – and to hear him say no one has a 100Mbps connection on the NBN makes me lol because I know for a fact he is FOS.

There is nothing to be gained by quoting a speed faster than the 100 Mb/s as opposed to one that is a bit less. Both demonstrate that the line speed is 100 Mb/s. Have to be a bit careful with the numbers because that upload speed you linked to is very ordinary. It should be close to 40 Mb/s.

I’m in another part of Tas and I typically get low 90’s Mb/s download and high 30’s Mb/s using Speedtest. In real usage I have seen 10 to 12 MB/s downloads from multiple sources. Fastest individual source has been about 6 MB/s.

I’ve found things like Dropbox become so much more practical with fast uploads. I use video in Skype now where I didn’t before. Call quality is superb. The best thing generally about fibre is that it is a far superior service and cheaper than what I was paying when I lived in Melbourne using ADSL 2+ or Telstra cable.

Forgot to say that I too agree that their is nothing to be gained by showing a speedtest higher then 100Mbps, as a 100Mbps plan is still a 100Mbps plan, even if it does not reach the full 1000Mbps because of technology overheads or other reasons.

It was posted only in reply to those in this thread saying it was not possible to achieve the full 100Mbps on an NBn connection – which it clearly disproves.

As per everything else in your reply, I agree 100%, and having had a 100Mbps NBN connection like you, it opened up som much more possibilities for me and my family too – allowing the same sort of online usage as you have found useful and practical with a faster connection.

I still feel the benefit of the NBN for people right now is the amount of bandwidth that is available to all in the household/premise – allowing everyone to access and enjoy things online, without others in the household/premise interfering with that experience due to lack of bandwidth available via slower technologies that use the deteriorating and unstable CAN.

“I still feel the benefit of the NBN for people right now is the amount of bandwidth that is available to all in the household/premise” — this.

If i’m on my PC and just 1 other device is connected at my place, I notice. The amount of connectivity the average house has these days is astounding, and its not going to reduce any time soon. So the total bandwidth isnt necessarily JUST about being faster, though that is an important part, but about being equally able to connect at speeds capable of doing what everyone needs, not just one person at a time.

If thats one person gaming, one person streaming, one person studying, then thats still 3 people needing access at one time. Being able to give enough for each is a massive step towards a truly digital world.

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Written by Delimiter Publisher Renai LeMay, The Frustrated State is the first in-depth book examining of how Australia’s political sector is systematically mismanaging technological change and crushing hopes that our nation will ever take its rightful place globally as a digital powerhouse and home of innovation.

Welcome! We were an energetic and engaged community of Australians who worked with or who were interested in technology -- all sorts of IT professionals, IT managers, CIOs, tech policy-makers and tech enthusiasts.